Facebook Upgrades M’s Capabilities And Rolls It Out To Users In The US

Remember M, Facebook‘s artificial intelligence assistant for Messenger? Well, it’s getting an upgrade – and it’s being released in the US.

So far, M was available to a limited set of users who provided generous feedback on its capabilities. As Laurent Landowski and Kemal El Moujahid, both Product Managers at Messenger explain:

[quote][we] learned a lot and these interactions have enabled us to build a completely automated version of M that suggests helpful actions in your chat, exposing features people may not have known were available right in Messenger.[/quote]

These features include:

– Sending stickers: M will have the ability to share sticker suggestions for your daily chats, like “Thank you” or “Bye-bye.”

– Paying or requesting money: M now recognises when people are discussing payments, and gives them the option to easily send or request money.

– Sharing your location: M can give you the option to share your location during a conversation.

– Making plans: If people are talking about getting together, M helps to coordinate a plan. (Can’t wait to see how this will work!)

– Starting a poll (in group conversations only): M lets you set a poll topic and vote in group conversations.

– Getting a Ride: M suggests “Get A Ride,” and provides a Lyft or Uber option.

To get M up and running, all you have to do is engage in everyday conversations with your friends, as you would normally do. M will make sure it offers the appropriate recommendations based on the context of your discussion. It’s that easy!

Since Facebook wants to make Messenger your go-to place for everyday tasks, it makes sense for it to endow M with even more features. Facebook is the middleware that sits on devices, thus it is potentially “detachable” from them. Investing in portability and platform independence, Facebook also aims at other services, such as Siri. This is getting very interesting, indeed.